Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise — it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.
But we started raising a LOT more money. Let me share my journey…
Something that made a big difference for my organization was creating fundraising materials that people could easily understand by writing at a lower reading level, using simpler sentences, and eliminating jargon.
As we started communicating differently, a whole host of worries came up. We worried donors would think we were talking down to them. We worried we wouldn’t come across as the “experts” we were.
We decided to try it anyway.
And none of the things we worried about actually happened.
We started to treat donors like the busy, caring people they were, and they appreciated it. We did the work to make our fundraising writing clear, so THEY didn’t have to do the work to read something dense and full of jargon.
Here are the main issues we focused on to make our writing clear and easy to understand:
- Using short sentences and short paragraphs
- Not using internal jargon that our donors wouldn’t easily understand
- Writing at a reading level between 6th and 8th grade so donors could understand our fundraising writing quickly
It didn’t take a lot to make our materials easier to understand. It didn’t cost any more money or take that much more time. It just took working through some discomfort internally.
But changing these three things to make our copy clear and easy to understand helped us raise more money for our mission!
Read the whole series:
- How a Strong Fundraising Offer Changes Everything
- Get to the Point FAST to Raise More Money with Your Appeals and E-Appeals
- Make Your Copy Clear and Easy to Understand to Raise More Money (This post)
